PRIM by MICHELLE ELIE presents MAKAK

September 10, 2012

032c WORKSHOP / Joerg Koch is pleased to present “Makak,” a new jewelry collection by PRIM by MICHELLE ELIE. Inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological travel memoir Tristes Tropiques, pre-colonial mythologies and Elie’s own Haitian roots, “Makak” represents a material fusion, as well as a cultural one. The unique, hand-made pieces contain silver, gold, wood, bone, leather, and plastic; they reflect an unconscious terrain of the early days of “discovery” in the West Indies, of continents untouched by modern man, subject only to the wonders of the jungle. The designs conjure in equal part Louise Bourgeois’ Maman spider and the phallic sheaths of the Amazonian Mundé. Their animal presence plays with our notion of what is delicate,and what is strong, what is feminine, and what is masculine.

Here, Elie’s sculptural accessories are presented by marionettes. Hand-painted by MARTIN MARGIELA in the early 1980s, they hang as though falling before a backdrop inspired by Yves Klein’s International Blue and Florian Baudrexel’s textured reliefs.The figures wear masks that conjure Michel Leiris’ Afrique Fantôme, or Lévi-Strauss’La Voie des Masques; one sports a vintage Scheifel gorilla fur coat, a throw-back to a time of attitudes past. New York stylist TROI OLLIVIERRE meanwhile takes us back to an imagined future, channeling the unsettling but majestic landscape of Planet of the Apes into the marionettes’ hair.

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